Titles like Minority Report, 1984, and Person of Interest have more in common than their dystopian themes — they all revolve around the idea of surveillance. In these worlds, powerful technologies watch, predict, and control entire populations, often led by white men in grey suits who claim to act for the greater good.
For many of us, these works were our first introduction to the concept of surveillance — how a state could use technology to monitor, nudge, and even manipulate its citizens.
We’ve all heard of Bigg Boss, the hit reality show that thrives on constant observation. But the show’s title is inspired by Big Brother — the authoritarian figure from George Orwell’s 1984, where citizens live under 24/7 surveillance, their every move scrutinized, their history rewritten to suit the present.
When I first read Orwell’s book, I was struck by how a novel written in 1948 could so accurately foreshadow the world we inhabit today.
From Sci-Fi to Reality
Science fiction has long flirted with the idea of predictive power. Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, later adapted into a blockbuster film, imagined a world where “PreCrime” units used the psychic abilities of three women to prevent crimes before they happened.
It was a thrilling premise — imagine a world where the police could stop a terrorist before he planted a bomb or catch a killer before his next victim.
Post-9/11 paranoia gave us Person of Interest, where an enigmatic billionaire builds an AI system that predicts and prevents crimes by analyzing surveillance feeds, communications, and online data. Inspired by real-world systems like the NSA’s PRISM program (exposed by Edward Snowden), the show asked:
What happens when the machine watching over us becomes more
powerful than the people it serves?
The Surveillance State Is No Longer Fiction
These ideas aren’t just fiction anymore. The Chinese government has developed one of the most advanced surveillance systems in history — a network of AI-powered cameras, internet monitoring, and predictive algorithms that track everything from protest activity to facial expressions.
This system has been credited with everything from solving a 20-year-old murder case to identifying citizens who criticize the government online. In Minority Report, psychic powers powered prediction.
Today, we use machine learning. The underlying logic isn’t so different: feed data into an intelligent system, find patterns, and forecast what’s likely to happen next.
Just as a regression algorithm predicts housing prices using variables like neighborhood, income, and size, predictive policing algorithms use data such as crime rates, demographics, and location history to “forecast” where the next crime might occur.
The difference is that housing predictions don’t put people in handcuffs.
And that brings us to Palantir.
Palantir: The Real-World Seeing Stone
For those unfamiliar, Palantir is one of the hottest tech stocks in the U.S. market — a data analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel (of PayPal fame) and Alex Karp.
Its story began in 2003, when the U.S. military wanted a system that could record and analyze everything happening on the battlefield — from IED explosions to insurgent activity — and even recommend where the next drone strike should occur.
As CEO Alex Karp bluntly put it, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people.” Palantir has since become a digital kill chain — a tool of data-driven warfare — deployed everywhere from Israel to Ukraine.
The irony runs deep: Karp, a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, named his company after the Palantíri, the “seeing stones” that allowed users to peer across Middle-earth. Like their fictional counterparts, these digital stones offer immense insight — and carry the risk of corruption and bias.
Former employees have warned that the platform grants governments unprecedented access to data — and too much power to interpret it as they wish. As with all AI systems, the algorithms behind Palantir are built by humans, often from dominant social or cultural groups. Their unconscious biases can seep into the code, shaping predictions in ways that reflect existing inequalities.
The All-Seeing Eye
Tolkien’s world also had another all-seeing presence — the Eye of Sauron, forever watching from the dark towers of Mordor.
We might smile at that comparison, but it’s an apt one. With technologies like Palantir, PRISM, and state-level AI surveillance, we are inching toward a world where an all-seeing eye never blinks — a presence that monitors, measures, and nudges everything we do.
From Orwell’s telescreens to Palantir’s dashboards, surveillance has evolved from fiction to infrastructure. The question isn’t whether the eye sees us anymore — it’s whether we’ll ever be able to look back.
